How to ruin a day

For two straight days, I woke up to the sound of a smoke alarm beeping. No smoke, just slow, steady beeping. Loud. First morning, I got six hours of sleep before it started. Today, I got four and a half.

Apartment maintenance man replaced a 9V battery while I was out. I hope he got the right one; there are three in the apartment. Guess I'll know in the morning.

To complete the day's SNAFU, while I was donating platelets at UBS, the g-d machine crashed.

Would not reboot. Blue screen of death.

On the plus side, while they got about half of the usual draw, I got to leave a half-hour early.

I immediately downed a Vicodin. Sleep deprivation, sinus ...

Come to think about it, things started sliding sideways Sunday night while I watched John Oliver. HBO went off. All the HBO channels. About half of Cinemax and half of Showtime.

Today, AT&T's computer called, three times. First call came when I was almost back to sleep amid the beeping. Ignored it (gotta love caller ID). Second came while I was hooked up to the failing blood-sucker. Third time, I answered. The computer was doing a survey, wanted to know about how my recent dealings with AT&T went. Fine, I guess; I don't remember any AT&T dealings.

Computer gave me the option of hanging up. Guess what I did?

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